XI
I sat staring across the table at Wilson for many minutes before my wits returned to me. The mate’s words seemed too awful to be true; they seemed words heard in a hideous nightmare. Throughout the night I had fought and denied the still whisperings of potential horrors aboard which had striven for room in my thoughts; and here the blackest depths of these horrors were realized by Wilson’s simple words. For in my mind’s eye I did not see the picture that his words should have conjured up: of a seaman swept from his post, falling into the sea by mischance, drowning in the dark, without a chance to be saved—I saw Brack talking to young Larson, I saw the brutal gleam of Garvin’s bandaged eyes, I saw—Good God! I was afraid to admit to myself what I did see.
“Lost?” I repeated stupidly. “You mean drowned?”
“Yes sir.”
“Good God!” I chattered. “How can you sit there and talk about it so calmly.”
“I have followed the sea since I was fourteen, Mr. Pitt,” he replied respectfully. “I have seen many men lost, good men, better men than myself. The sea is hard.”
“But how—how could it happen?”
“I don’t know, sir; it wasn’t in my watch.”
As he rose to go he added, with a puzzled shake of his head—
“He was a good seaman, too, Larson was, and a clean, sober young fellow.”